| Topic: | Re:Re:Has the EU prevented war ? | |
| Posted by: | David Giles | |
| Date/Time: | 11/03/08 21:37:00 |
| Richard you are of course quite correct. The idea that the Common Market, the European Economic Community, the european Community or the European Union were or are responsible for keeping the peace in Europe is simply not true. NATO was formed long before the EU and it has been responsible for pacifying, protecting and unifying first Western Europe and now increasingly Central Europe as well. The horrors of the Second World War in Europe were so great and affercted the civilian populations of Europe so much, that all the states and peoples of Western Europe resolved after 1945 not to have wars within Europe any more. Peace in Europe was more or less inevitable after the horrors of 1939-1945 and if any country thought differently they would have to challenge NATO and its main component for many years - the US Army, Air Force and Navy based in Europe. The US, Britain, Canada and France occupied Western Germany for many years and still maintain forces there. There are still US and other Nato bases all over Europe stretching from Norway in the North to Turkey and Greece in the South and to Spain and Portugal in the West. There was a threat from the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies and that threat undoubtably helped to unify Europe within NATO, EFTA and the EEC. NATO kept us free during the forties, fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties when the threat from the Soviet Union was real - as the people of the Baltic States, Poland, East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia well knew. But that threat had subsided long before term "the European Community" replaced the predominantly economic European Econonomic Community in 1993 let alone before the formation of the European Union more recently. It was NATO intervention in Former Yugoslavia that kept the peace there and not any EU intervention. In contrast to NATO, EU foreign policy has been weak and pretty well useless.Quite frankly we don't need an EU foreign policy and we don't need an EU Army. |